When Figma Was Just How We Worked // What Survives E01
Shownotes
A late-night DM from a listener named Chris asked me something I couldn’t answer: did I lose my identity as a designer? My team just went one hundred percent Cursor, no more Figma. This season, I figure out what AI actually changes about the work, and what it never touched.
When the tool that defined your job for a decade disappears overnight, what part of “designer” actually leaves with it?
This is the first solo season in the history of Beyond UX Design. No guests, no interviews, just me working through one question that landed in my DMs late one night from Chris, a listener I’ve known for years. He asked whether I felt like I’d lost my identity as a designer after my team dropped Figma and went fully into Cursor. My gut said no. Thirty seconds later, I realized I didn’t actually know. That question became this whole season.
Episode one is about the world right before the change, back when Figma was just how we worked. I walk through what a normal design process looked like on my team, and then I get honest about something we don’t talk about enough: how much of “being a good designer” got quietly measured by tool fluency. Named layers, auto layout, clean files. None of that is capital-D design, but it stood in for it because it was the thing we could see, screenshot, and post about on LinkedIn
I also take on a good question from the original LinkedIn thread that inspired this. If you could always design and build in code, why is this suddenly a big deal now? My answer comes down to opportunity cost, and it reframes what AI actually changed. Spoiler: it wasn’t the ability to code. It was the time. If any of this sounds familiar, whether your team already made the switch or you can feel it coming, hit play and come along for the season.
Topics:
• 00:00 – The DM from Chris: “Do you feel as if you lost your identity as a designer?”
• 02:40 – The late-night LinkedIn message
• 03:20 – Why the identity question never crossed my mind
• 04:10 – 127 comments, and why they were almost all tactical
• 05:30 – This isn’t just a designer problem: PMs and engineers too
• 06:00 – What “normal” looked like: the old design-to-handoff process
• 07:30 – How designers quietly ranked each other on tool fluency
• 09:20 – Why tool skills got mistaken for design skills for a decade
• 10:40 – Derek’s challenge: “We could always design in code, so why now?”
• 11:20 – My front-end dev origin story and why it doesn’t settle the debate
• 12:50 – The real answer: opportunity cost, not ability
• 13:50 – What AI actually changed: collapsing the time to do both
• 14:40 – Were there warning signs? The pilots I read as experiments
• 16:00 – The real danger isn’t replacement, it’s belief
• 16:30 – What survives so far: research, flows, judgment, taste
• 17:10 – What still gets me, and a look ahead to episode two
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